MORE THAN SIMPLE PLAGIARISM: LIGOTTI, PIZZOLATTO, AND TRUE DETECTIVE’S TERRESTRIAL HORROR
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Date
2017
Authors
Elmore, Jonathan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Abstract
Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” (“Long Bright Dark”). In doing so, the series employs Southern gothic conventions to look forward rather than backward in time. Rather than the decay and degeneration of the landscape as reflective of the past, such squalor points forward to a time, rapidly approaching, when the setting will itself be swallowed by the sea. Hence, True Detective enacts a more practical approach to Ligotti’s horror, one I’m calling terrestrial horror.
Keywords: True Detective, Terrestrial Horror, Thomas Ligotti, Pessimism, Ecocriticism, Cosmic Horror
Description
Keywords
Type of access: Open Access
Citation
Elmore, J. (2017). More than simple plagiarism. Ligotti, Pizzolatto, and True Detective terrestrial horror. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 4(1). http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v4-issue-1/more-than-simple-plagiarism-ligotti-pizzolatto-and-true-detectives-terrestrial-horror/